The Snow Culture is Changing

Since returning home from the recent Nordic trip I've been working to get caught up with office details and shoveling snow.

Even before I returned Maine was hit with a massive snow dump - about two feet of snow. Mary Beth did alot of the cleaning up and we have a big house and driveway that require much care after a big snow. The buildup on the roof had to wait for me to come home and try to rake some of it off. It's amazing the weight that snow can put onto a roof.

Instead of going to the local YMCA I get alot of good aerobic exercise shoveling and I love doing it. Likely all those years of sweating so much in hot, humid Florida left me itching to grab a shovel. We complain now and then about it but there is nothing more peaceful, and beautiful, than right after a big snowfall. I love being in it.

While in Gothenburg, Sweden (where we only saw a light dusting of snow) one young man told me he grew up in the winter snow culture. His younger brother though has not had those experiences due to changes in global weather patterns. He longs for snow but it has not been coming in recent years.

Our winter began being unusually mild - very little of the traditional hard Maine cold - in fact many of the regions lakes and rivers have not frozen solid. We had very little snow until this recent big dump. So the patterns are thrown off and fluctuating wildly. Our Mother Earth's body is in toxic shock as she tries to shake the fleas (us) off her back.

We broke three plastic snow shovels during this recent dump - so even the shovels had a limit to what they could handle. Housemate Brown Lethem went to the local hardware store to get a couple new shovels and few were to be found for sale.

Some of my Florida friends keep an eye on my snow escapades so I am sure they will enjoy this latest story. One of them once said that I'd be back down to the Sunshine State after one year in Maine (and then amended her prediction to two years acknowledging I am very stubborn) but I can report I'm pretty well set here now.

I'll keep shoveling as best I can and hope the American people will rise up and demand we stop building war machines and instead do a quick reversal away from our fossil fuel economy. We could create more jobs if we went fully to sustainable living.

Sadly most folks are just hustling to make a buck and many have given up paying attention. Fortunately there are legions around the world still in the fight.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Progressive Jews Stand Against Friedman

AlterNet reports: Protesters repeatedly disrupted the confirmation hearing on Thursday for Trump's pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.

Many of the activists were members of Jewish peace groups. One man even blew a shofar, a traditional Jewish horn, inside the hearing in protest.

The progressive Jewish group IfNotNow organized the action. Three of its members were arrested.

Friedman is notorious for his extreme pro-Israel, anti-Muslim views. He
supports Israel's illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, which
are built in flagrant contravention of international law. Friedman has
demonized liberal Jews, calling them worse than Nazi collaborators, and
has spread Islamophobic conspiracies. He has pledged to move the U.S.
embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in violation of international law.

These photos below from Ellen Davidson who is now in Palestine with a Veterans For Peace delegation. They joined today the 12th anniversary of the nonviolent demonstrations against the apartheid wall in
Bil'in.

Assange Calls Out 'Intel Community'

That comment by Assange says it all - you don't have to be an apologist for Trump to acknowledge what is really going on here. The deep state lost the election - Hillary was their chosen candidate and now they are working hard to 'Putinize' Trump because he was not eager to push war with Russia.

In a real democracy if you lose you deal with it and rebuild for the next election. In this case the deep state is working to enact a coup d'état.

The CIA runs this country now - they create the US foreign policy and now they have shown that they intend to run domestic policy as well. That is a serious problem - no matter who the president is.

In 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon told the South Vietnamese to prolong negotiations with North Vietnam. He would get them a better deal when he became president. In 1980 Ronald Reagan told the Iranians to hold the American hostages until he became president, which they did. Neither one was prosecuted.

Sadly many on the 'left' are eager to see Trump gone no matter how it is done. They are missing the clear danger of this historic moment. Far too many people follow blindly what ever the Democrats, and their front groups, tell them to think.....

Deep State: Ginning Up a War with Russia

Former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley says there’s a
difference between leaking and whistleblowing, and it’s likely that
former took place in the ongoing power struggle between the deep state
and the executive branch of government.

She claims that the deep state is "ginning up a war with Russia". Washington DC right now is a struggle for power between the deep state and the White House, she says.

Crowley gives an excellent overview for those who are wanting more than the usual anti-Russia propaganda coming from the media and the Democratic Party - which is turning out to be the big-time 'red baiter' of our time.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Deep State: War Within American Ruling Elites

Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) on Gen. Michael Flynn resigning as
President Trump's National Security Advisor and the divide between the
intelligence community and Trump.

During an interview on the FOX Business Network,
former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said the
intelligence community was responsible for leaking information that
Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Flynn, had secretly discussed
sanctions with Russian officials before the inauguration and argued
their goal was to spoil the relationship between the U.S. and Russia.

“What’s at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence
community to upend any positive relationship between the U.S. and
Russia,” Kucinich said.

And in his opinion, there is a big money motive behind it.

“And I tell you there's a marching band and Chowder Society out
there. There's gold in them there hills,” he said. “There are people
trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so that this military industrial
intel axis can cash in.”

Kucinich added the intelligence community could start a war to succeed.

“There’s a game going on inside the intelligence community where
there are those who want to separate the U.S. from Russia in a way that
would reignite the Cold War,” he said.

If You Really Want to Understand - the Inside Scoop

The neocon-dominated U.S. foreign policy establishment won an
important victory in forcing the resignation of President Trump’s
National Security Advisor Michael Flynn over a flimsy complaint that he
had talked to the Russian ambassador during the transition.

The Washington Post, the neoconservatives’ media flagship, led the
assault on Flynn, an unorthodox thinker who shared the neocons’
hostility toward Iran but broke with them in seeing no strategic reason
to transform Russia into an implacable enemy.

After Flynn’s resignation on Monday evening, the Post gloated over
its success in achieving the first major crack in Trump’s resistance to
Official Washington’s establishment. The Post cited Flynn’s “potentially
illegal contacts” with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a reference
to the Logan Act, a 1799 never-enforced law that forbids private
citizens from negotiating with a country in dispute with the U.S.
government.

Though no one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act, it has
been cited in recent decades as an excuse to attack American citizens
who disagree with U.S. government policies while traveling abroad and
having contacts with foreign leaders.

Often those accusations are aimed at Americans seeking to peacefully
resolve disputes when a U.S. president is eager to escalate a conflict,
such as President Ronald Reagan’s denunciations of civil rights leader
Jesse Jackson for visiting Cuba and House Speaker Jim Wright for
exploring ways to end the Contra war in Nicaragua.

In other words, the Logan Act is usually exploited in a McCarthyistic
fashion to bait or discredit peace advocates, similarly to how it has
now been used to destroy Flynn for daring to look for ways to reduce the
dangerous tensions between Washington and Moscow.

But the media-driven attacks on Flynn are particularly curious since
he was the National Security Advisor-designate of an incoming
administration at the time of the calls and – as such – he would be
expected to make contacts with important foreign officials to begin
laying the groundwork for relations with the new president.

Whether U.S. sanctions against Russia were mentioned or not, the
notion that an elected president or his designees – during a transition –
can have no meaningful contact with diplomats whom they may need to
deal with in a matter of weeks represents a particularly contentious
interpretation of a law that has never been tested in a court of law and
may well represent an unconstitutional infringement on free speech and
dissent.

An Expanding Hysteria

Indeed, referencing the Logan Act appears to be an excuse to continue
– and expand – Official Washington’s hysteria over Russia, which has
become the useful villain to blame for every U.S. foreign policy debacle
and even Hillary Clinton’s disastrous presidential run.

Flynn’s more egregious offense in this case may have been to mislead
Vice President Mike Pence on exactly what was discussed, but Trump’s
White House has not seemed previously overly concerned with the precise
accuracy of its statements.

Indeed, Trump and his team have tangled themselves up for weeks by
promoting “alternative facts” — that Donald Trump’s inaugural crowd was
bigger than Barack Obama’s and that Trump would have won the popular
vote if not for three million to five million illegal votes. Though
these absurd claims pertain more to Trump’s ego than to anything
important, he and his representatives have continued fighting these
fights on Twitter and TV appearances and show no signs of stopping.

So, the ouster of Flynn for failing to provide a complete readout on
some telephone conversations in December stands out as even more
significant in the context of the deluge of falsehoods that have poured
forth from Trump’s White House.

Flynn’s real “offense” appears to be that he favors détente with
Russia rather than escalation of a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump’s
idea of a rapprochement with Moscow – and a search for areas of
cooperation and compromise – has been driving Official Washington’s
foreign policy establishment crazy for months and the neocons, in
particular, have been determined to block it.

Though Flynn has pandered to elements of the neocon movement with his
own hysterical denunciations of Iran and Islam in general, he emerged
as a key architect for Trump’s plans to seek a constructive relationship
with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Meanwhile, the neocons and their
liberal-interventionist sidekicks have invested heavily in making Putin
the all-purpose bête noire to justify a major investment in new
military hardware and in pricy propaganda operations.

The neocons and liberal hawks also hated Flynn because – as director
of the Defense Intelligence Agency – he oversaw a prescient 2012 analysis
that foresaw that their support for the Syrian insurgency would give
rise to “a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern
Syria.”

The DIA report, which was partially declassified in a lawsuit over
the 2012 killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other U.S.
personnel in Benghazi, Libya, embarrassed the advocates for an
escalation of the war in Syria and the ouster of secular President
Bashar al-Assad.

Flynn even went further in a 2015 interview
when he said the intelligence was “very clear” that the Obama
administration made a “willful decision” to back these jihadists in
league with Middle East allies, a choice that looked particularly stupid
when Islamic State militants started beheading American hostages and
capturing cities in Iraq.

A Beloved ‘Regime Change’

But “regime change” in Syria was dear to the neocons’ hearts. After
all, Israeli leaders had declared Assad’s removal central to smashing the so-called “Shiite crescent” reaching from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut.

The neocons and liberal hawks had come very close to getting the direct
U.S. military intervention that they so wanted to destroy Assad’s army
after a mysterious sarin gas attack
outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. The Obama administration quickly
pinned the atrocity on Assad even though a number of U.S. intelligence
analysts suspected a “false flag” attack carried out by jihadists.

Still, despite those doubts, it appeared a bombing campaign against
Assad was in the offing, except that Obama delayed its implementation
and Putin then proposed an alternative in which Assad would surrender
all his chemical weapons.

Putin’s interference in the neocon/liberal-hawk war plans made him
the new prime target – and Ukraine became ground zero for the effort to
explode the cooperative relationship between Obama and Putin.

On Sept. 26, 2013, only weeks after the aborted U.S. bombing campaign
against Syria, Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the
U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took
to the Post’s op-ed page to declare “Ukraine the biggest prize” and
suggest that winning it could ultimately lead to toppling Putin inside
Russia.

Key U.S. government neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for
European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, then began
pushing for the violent right-wing coup that – in February 2014 – ousted
Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych and touched off the new
Cold War with Russia.

Amid these heightened tensions, the mainstream media in the United
States and Europe joined in the full-scale Russia/Putin-bashing. All
rational perspective on the underlying reality was lost, except for a
handful of independent Internet journalists and foreign-policy outsiders
who rejected the over-the-top propaganda.

A Few Dissenters Too Many

But even a few dissenters were a few dissenters too many. So, to
enforce the new groupthink – holding Russia at fault for pretty much
everything – a new McCarthyism emerged, deeming anyone who dared
disagree a “Moscow stooge” or a “Russian propagandist.”

The ugliness penetrated into the U.S. presidential campaign because
Democrat Hillary Clinton took a belligerent line toward Russia while
Trump broke with the Republican establishment and called for improved
ties between Washington and Moscow. Clinton called Trump Putin’s
“puppet” and – after Clinton’s stunning loss – the Obama administration
floated unproven allegations that Putin had intervened in the election
to put Trump in the White House.

This hysteria over Russia gained added strength because Democrats
were so angry over Trump’s election that liberal and progressive
operatives saw a chance to build a movement and raise lots of money by
pushing the Trump-Putin accusations.

This opportunism has turned much of the liberal/progressive community
into a pro-New Cold War constituency willing to engage in a new breed
of McCarthyism by demanding intensive investigations into alleged
connections between Americans and Russians.

From the neocon side, The Washington Post has gone so far as to promote baseless accusations
from an anonymous group called PropOrNot that 200 Internet sites,
including Consortiumnews.com and other important independent news
sources, are guilty of spreading Russian propaganda. Congress approved a new $160 million bureaucracy to combat such “propaganda.”

However, since Trump’s inauguration, the focus has shifted to Flynn,
as the personification of the effort to cool off the New Cold War,
because he had phone conversations with the Russian ambassador that
presumably were intercepted by U.S. intelligence.

Because Flynn supposedly misrepresented some details of the calls to
Vice President Mike Pence, senior Justice Department holdovers from the
Obama administration concocted an argument that Flynn might be
vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

The argument is dubious because the Russians would know that the U.S.
government knew exactly what the conversations entailed, so how would
the blackmail work? But this “blackmail” argument is another throwback
to the earlier McCarthy days when gays were barred from sensitive
government jobs because of their alleged susceptibility to blackmail.

But the gambit to get Flynn worked. Amid frenzied coverage on CNN,
MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and the rest of the
mainstream media, Flynn and the Russia détente that he stood for were
not expected to be long for this world of Official Washington.

Flynn’s resignation and its acceptance by Trump also prove that these
tactics work and that “tough-guy” Trump is not immune to them. While
the President may battle to the end over pointless questions about the
size of his inaugural crowd and his belief that he should have won the
popular vote, he will cave when the pressure builds on a matter of
genuine substance and real importance to the future of the world.

The so-called permanent government of Washington and its complicit
mainstream media – what some call the Deep State – have taught Trump a
lesson and have learned a lesson, too. They now can be expected to
redouble their march toward war and more war, ironically with
progressives and leftists in tow.~ Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Final Day in Copenhagen

On the final day of our speaking tour in the Nordic nations Dave Webb and I were taken from Malmo, Sweden on the train to Copenhagen by our host Andre Brochu. It's a short ride and as you cross over the water on the rail bridge in the near distance you see a large wind turbine farm. To me these wind turbines signify life and the creation of a real future for the coming generations.

We had a lively meeting on the 3rd floor of a former school that has been turned into a community meeting space. In virtually each of the places we spoke during this tour to Sweden, Finland and Denmark there was a public peace center or community space with offices for progressive groups and rooms for meetings.

One of the big issues facing Denmark is the US pushing them to purchase the F-35 fighter that is getting lots of bad reviews for being a complicated and temperamental war plane. Peace activists there are organizing a campaign to block their government from buying the planes - the US is even demanding they purchase spare parts up front which is not a real confidence builder in the quality of the 'product'.

Just like in all the other meetings Dave and I participated in during this trip, the demonization of Russia by NATO was at the forefront in our discussions. One Danish woman in the meeting said, "We've got to work together
globally and do it around NATO which is at the center of what is creating tensions."

The next official NATO meeting will be held in Brussels on May 24-25 and will be met by European-wide peace protests. Then in August and September NATO will be holding their Aurora war games in Gothenburg, Sweden and peace groups in the Nordic region are gearing up to organize protests there as well.

One man during the Copenhagen meeting talked about the cuts in social programs they are now experiencing as the US pushes NATO members (and partners) to increase their contributions to the war alliance. The US-based weapons industry wants NATO members to buy more weapons and that can only be done if each country forces more domestic austerity cuts and sticks the money in the NATO war budget.

The public transit system in Copenhagen (like in all Nordic nations) was impressive. So were the loads of bicycles on Copenhagen streets. These countries are doing their part to help move away from addiction to fossil fuels. I wish I could say we were doing the same thing back home in my state of Maine.

In Maine we are building weapons for endless war, have very little public transportation, our governor has scuttled the offshore wind farm that a Norwegian company wanted to build in the Gulf of Maine, and our governor has been laying underground pipes to move fracked gas into our state.

We've got much to learn here in the US. It would help if environmental groups took a stronger position opposing the US military which has the largest carbon boot print on Mother Earth. There is an effort underway to try to get the People's Climate March scheduled for Washington DC on April 29 to recognize the military's massive role as the world's biggest polluter. You can sign a petition calling on the march organizers to include this important issue here.

Thanks to all those who invited and hosted Dave and me during this trip. We learned alot, made many new friends, and helped share our story about how space technology now directs all warfare on Earth. People were interested and receptive and I am sure will integrate what they learned from us just like we will integrate what we learned from them into our work as well.

Inciting Ukraine Against Russia

A video has surfaced online in which warmongers Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Lindsey
Graham (R-SC) are caught meeting with the Ukraine military, encouraging them to
launch an offensive against Russia and restart hostilities, all the
while describing Russia as the “aggressor” that must “pay a heavier
price.”

Sen. Graham says, “Your fight is our fight, 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us
will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia.
Enough of a Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a heavier
price.“

John McCain was no less provocative: “I believe you will win. I am convinced you will win and we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win.”

(Graham begins speaking at 1:10 in the video and McCain follows)

Just to prove that this was a bi-partisan trip notice that Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a so-called 'liberal', was along on the trip (in yellow coat).

Yeah - great idea - let's start a real war with Russia - it should be easier than Iraq or Afghanistan has been!